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Is it a good idea for a nation to let wealthy international hunters shoot threatened species as a way to generate tourism dollars? What if the species in question may not be threatened elsewhere? That’s the question being asked after one former Soviet bloc country decided to open hunting seasons on several internationally threatened species.

When Georgia’s hunting season opened last month, hunters were allowed, for the first time, to train their sights on several threatened species. The decision by the Energy and Natural Resources Ministry to permit hunting for animals on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s list of threatened species, commonly called the Red List, is part of Tbilisi’s efforts to promote tourism. Some conservation groups contend the decision could be the death knell for species already under extreme strain from poachers, with even the environment minister weighing in against it. Researchers and environmentalists say there is no reliable count of how many of the threatened animals still roam the forests and mountains of Georgia.

In September, the Natural Resources Ministry proposed that hunting be allowed for several Red List species, including the brown bear, the Caucasian tur (a goat antelope), the bezoar goat, Caucasian grouse, and red deer. In an interview at the time, the ministry’s head, Alexandre Khetaguri, said Turkey, Ukraine, and Austria were already luring international hunters and it made sense for Georgia to profit from the trade as well.

Although the brown bear is not threatened globally, Georgia’s Red List (pdf), deems it endangered. The IUCN warns that even where the bears exist in large, contiguous populations, “they are sometimes hunted for sport or killed for control purposes at unsustainable rates.” The group notes that many countries lack the resources to maintain “adequate monitoring programs and sustainable management plans” for the bears. Red deer, too, are plentiful globally, but they are considered critically endangered in Georgia, as is the bezoar goat. The Caucasian grouse is classed as vulnerable on the country list.

Because of a calamitous case of human error, I did not get to review the Weatherby Series 2 Vanguard when it came out last year. So, making up for lost time, I can say that I’ve shot one in .308 at some length, and can state without fear of contradiction that it’s one of the best hunting rifles around at any price.

The Series 2 barreled action is made in Japan by Howa, as it always has been, but the stock is now made in the United States, and the rifles are assembled here. There’s a blued and a stainless version; the MSRP for the former is $489, and for the latter $200 more.

There are two principle changes to the rifle. First is the stock. Weatherby has scrapped the old, clubby stock for a new one that follows the lines of the original Mark V stock very closely, including the wonderful, slim pistol grip. Second is the trigger, which is now a true two-stage mechanism that is virtually perfect. No creep, no drag, dead-clean release, 3 ½ pounds every time, and if you even think of messing with it you’re nuts.

Howa has always turned out beautifully finished guns, but the Series 2 rifles I’ve handled have gone a step beyond that. They are literally flawless. The fit and finish are perfect. It’s the kind of work you see in rifles that come from custom gun makers. For a $500 factory rifle to exhibit this kind of work is amazing. The only other rifle on the market I can think of that’s in this league is the Tikka T3.

Weatherby guarantees that all the Series 2 Vanguards will shoot sub-MOA with Weatherby ammo or with premium ammo. This does not mean that it will shoot tiny groups with anything you shove into it. My rifle did only fair with most factory ammo (It shot a minute of angle with Federal 165-grain Trophy Bonded Tip loads.), but with handloads it was a new day.

With 165-grain Hornady WLR loads, the rifle averaged .995. With Sierra 150-grain Game King softpoints (these are hunting bullets, not match bullets) it averaged .580, with one spread going into .196, which nearly caused me to wet myself. Or maybe I did wet myself; I forget.

There are a number of rifles in this price range that shoot very well, but with the exception of the T-3 I can’t think of any that are as nicely made, or have a trigger that can match the one on the Series 2. If the shooting public catches on to how good a rifle this new Vanguard is, Series 2s will be as hard to find as service stations that sell gas for $1.50 a gallon.

According to the rumor mill, there are some folks in the industry wondering, “What the heck does Hurteau have against Nose Jammer?” Not much, really. Other than the fact that it promises something that to me seems both patently ridiculous and empirically untrue, the stuff is innocuous enough and may indeed give hunters an advantage in the woods.

Yes, I do wish the marketers of scent-control products in particular would lay off the insultingly overblown claims; we all remember, as reader RS08 pointed out in the last post, “Forget the wind, just hunt.”

But the truth is, I was relieved to find, based on my tests, that Nose Jammer does not “Jam Big Game Animals’ Ability to Smell.” Thank goodness. If it did, I would have a much more serious objection. So as long as you take the can’s explicit claim with a grain of salt and buy it as a cover scent, I say God bless. Purchase it by the case and envelop yourself in a sweet cloud of vanillin.

But anyone who uses Nose Jammer believing it actually jams noses really should consider the fair-chase implications. It’s one thing to try to cover your own scent; it’s another to introduce an agent to the environment that handicaps the deer, depriving them of one of their most critical natural defenses. If that’s fair chase, maybe wildlife agencies—who are often keen on ways to harvest more deer—could start sponsoring trap-and-release programs to surgically remove deer noses, and we could finally put an end to this whole inconvenience of the sport requiring woodsmanship and skill. Yes, we’d have to take out their eyes and ears, too. But one thing at a time.

Meanwhile, to those of you using it as a cover scent, more power to you. Just don’t be upset if I show up at your stand asking for a cookie.

I sat in on a lot of cool seminars, met a lot of cool people, saw a lot of cool dogs, and discovered a few cool new products (all of which I’ll write about in future blogs), but for sheer, unadulterated cool, nothing could top listening to and meeting the undisputed dean of American bird dog trainers.

How cool is Delmar Smith? Chuck Norris showed up at one of his seminars, and Delmar had him force-broke and steady to shot by the end of the day. He’s so cool the folks at NPR ask him to be on their game shows (No really, they did. Listen to the podcast. It’s a gem. Delmar absolutely kills it…)

The man is just plain cool, and, at 86, is folksier, wiser, and wittier than just about anyone else out there, at any age. Here’s what the late, great Field & Stream gun dogs editor Bill Tarrant had to say about Smith in the introduction to their book Best Way To Train Your Gundog: The Delmar Smith Method: “Delmar Smith’s the most distinctive man I ever met. I’d know his hide if it were hanging in a tanning yard. He belongs to neither this second nor this speck of universe. Like truth, he’s a simple, eternal force.”

I got the chance to ask Delmar a few quick questions in a break between his seminar schedule, and it was a special treat to get a few minutes in the presence of legend.

Out of all the dogs you’ve owned, trained and competed with, is there one that stands out above all the others?

“I’ve got to say there really isn’t one dog that I can point to. There are going be some dogs that just seem to have something others don’t, find birds where others can’t, dogs that just seem to make birds, but I’ve had so many great dogs over the years that I can’t pick a favorite. It’s like asking me to pick my favorite kid. I don’t have one. I love ’em all equally.”

You still live in Edmond, Oklahoma, and even though that area has grown up around you, do you ever get the chance to get out and go quail hunting?

“No, I don’t get out to hunt much, but when you’re training dogs every day, well, then it’s sorta like you’re bird hunting every day.”

You co-wrote a book with Bill Tarrant and were close friends with him for years. Can you give a few thoughts on him?

“Bill Tarrant was, without a doubt, one of the most highly-educated men I ever met. We’d be settin’ there talkin’ and I’d have to tell him to start over ’cause I didn’t know what he was sayin’. He was also one of those people who was completely dedicated to dogs. I never met anyone who didn’t like him or say what a great writer he was.”

If there’s one quality a dog trainer needs above all others, what do you think it is?

“It’s the ability to train on the dog’s level. That dog wasn’t born knowing the English language, but he’ll talk to you if you just try to listen to what he’s saying on his own level. A dog ‘aint ever goin’ to lie to you, but you got to be able to know what it is he’s tellin’ you.”

You’ve been doing this for a long time now. Do you have any plans to slow down and take life easy?

“Nope, not at all. We’ve got things, feed and training and tools and knowledge, that we couldn’t even dream of fifty years ago. Why, the world of bird dogs and bird dog training is more exciting now than it ever was. I’m still havin’ fun.”

So there you go, words of wisdom from Delmar Smith, World’s Coolest Man 2012.

An entire flower from the Ice Age has been resurrected by Russian scientists in a pioneering experiment that could pave the way for the revival of other species including the mammoth. They say the Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated and is fertile, producing white flowers and viable seeds. The raw material for the project was fruit tissues from an Ice Age squirrel’s chamber, a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 years. The Russians said the experiment proves that permafrost serves as a natural depository for ancient life forms. They published their findings in Tuesday’s “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” of the United States.

“We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in search of an ancient genetic pool, that of pre-existing life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the earth’s surface,” the scientists said in the article. Canadian researchers had earlier regenerated some significantly younger plants from seeds found in burrows. Svetlana Yashina of the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy Of Sciences, who led the regeneration effort, said the revived plant looked very similar to its modern version, which still grows in the same area in northeastern Siberia.

“It’s a very viable plant, and it adapts really well,” she told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from the Russian town of Pushchino where her lab is located. She voiced hope the team could continue its work and regenerate more plant species. The Russian research team recovered the fruit after investigating dozens of fossil burrows hidden in ice deposits on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in northeastern Siberia, the sediments dating back 30,000-32,000 years.

The burrows were located 125 feet below the present surface in layers containing bones of large mammals, such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, horse and deer. The group says the study has demonstrated that tissue can survive ice conservation for tens of thousands of years, opening the way to the possible resurrection of Ice Age mammals. “If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue,” Dr Gubin told The Associated Press. “And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth.” Japanese scientists are already searching in the same area for mammoth remains, but Dr Gubin voiced hope that the Russians will be the first to find some frozen animal tissue that could be used for regeneration. “It’s our land, we will try to get them first,” he said.

So maybe, just maybe, we’ll someday end up having that “best woolly mammoth caliber” discussion after all…

The other night I had the pleasure of listening to a talk by Tony Sanchez-Arino who, at age 82, is about to begin his 60th season as an African professional hunter. In addition to countless safaris, he was also an ivory hunter and, I would guess, a game-control shooter. His numbers of animals taken are staggering: just under 1,300 elephant, 2,044 Cape buffalo, and 322 lion. His talk dealt with the three questions he is most often asked.

Which is better, a double rifle or a bolt action?

Answer: “They’re both good. You go with whatever is most familiar to you. Don’t go to Africa with a rifle that’s new and strange.”

What’s the most dangerous animal?

“That’s impossible to answer, because a lot of it depends on the country in which you hunt them. For example, Cape buffalo in open country are as easy to kill as cattle, but in heavy cover they’re something else. I can tell you what is most likely to kill you if it gets hold of you, and those animals are, in order, elephant, Cape buffalo, and lion.”

What’s the toughest animal to stop?

“The Cape buffalo is by far the toughest. Sometimes when you’re shooting them it seems like you’re giving them vitamin pills. Lions can be difficult because they’re so fast; a lion can cover 100 meters in 6 seconds. People get in trouble because they shoot at them from too far away. Get close and you won’t have a problem. Elephants are comparatively easy to drop.”

And as a side note, Sr. Sanchez-Arino’s favorite bullet is the Swift A-Frame (which is true for a number of PHs I’ve talked to) and the rifle he uses most is a .416 Rigby bolt-action.

He’s contemptuous of a number of things: “Ballistics tables, all these formulas and numbers, anything you read on the Internet, and ‘experts.’ All you need is a bullet with enough penetration to reach the vitals of whatever you’re hunting. The rest is nonsense. And never believe anything you read on the Internet, or anything you hear from an ‘expert.’ From them, you get horse***t in industrial quantities.”

He has never, in the course of all his years in the profession, gotten so much as a scratch.

If you’ve been following along, you know that I’ve taken a few lighthearted pot shots at Nose Jammer, a spectacularly popular new vanillin-based “olfactory nerve overload system” in an aerosol spray. Well, I got a chance to test it last fall, and am finally getting around to reporting my findings.

For years, a contingent of deer hunters has trumpeted the efficacy of using vanilla extract as a cover scent. So except for making me hungry, I have no major problems with the fact that when you spray Nose Jammer in the woods, it smells like you’ve opened a box of vanilla cookies. What cracks me up, though, and what I’ve been specifically poking fun at, is the name of the product and the claim—written right on the can—that it “Jams Big Game Animal’s Ability to Smell.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I find it comically flabbergasting that a thing so almost certainly unproven and probably unprovable can be written right on the can. Right there. In bold. Which brings me to my test.

But let me first commend Nose Jammer’s maker, John Redmond (by all accounts a good guy and fine deer hunter), on this point: He obviously believes in his product. I can only assume that it was he who sent me (a proven cynic) an unmarked and unsolicited box containing two cans of Nose Jammer to try.

And I gave it a fair trial. The long and short of it is this: It seemed to confuse some deer—in some cases long enough to make them linger where they probably shouldn’t have, especially had I been using a gun instead of a bow. In other cases, the deer just bolted.

My initial two encounters reflect this. The first, at a casual walk, a small buck got straight downwind of my stand and got his nostrils full of the stuff at about 50 yards. His reaction was obvious; he stopped dead and sniffed the air for the longest time. He’d retreat and then come back to the spot to sniff some more. He eventually snorted and trotted off. About a half hour later, a doe and a fawn hit the Nose Jammer scent stream at about 70 yards. But that old nanny wasn’t fooled for a second. She instantly bounded off; blowing, with fawn in tow.

Now to me, those first two encounters alone should prove that Nose Jammer does not jam a deer’s ability to smell. So why say that it does? It may indeed be a comparatively effective cover scent. So why not say “The Most Effective Cover Scent You Can Buy”? That, too, might be impossible to prove. But unlike the current claim, it’s not so easy to disprove.

I’m going to the dogs this weekend, which means I’m off to the National Pheasant Fest and Quail Classic in Kansas City, which, unlike SHOT, remains mostly a zombie-free zone. There are, however, tons of upland hunting, gundog and conservation-related vendors and speakers at the trade show. So if there are any training questions you’d like me ask, products you’d like me to keep an eye out for or gundog breeds (there are dozens of breed clubs at the show) you’d be interested in learning more about, be sure to tell me in the comments section.

In the meantime, here’s an interesting story that dovetails nicely with my last blog post on GPS technology. South Carolina lawmakers are considering a bill that would make it a crime for anyone other than a dog’s owner to remove its GPS tracking collar.

The sometimes malicious dispute about hunting dogs running loose edged closer to a resolution Wednesday, when lawmakers agreed to advance a tougher law against vandals. At issue before a South Carolina Senate panel was how to punish people who remove or destroy the electronic collar or device a hunter has placed on a hunting dog. The Senate Agriculture and Natural Resources Subcommittee approved the bill, H. 3372, to make it a misdemeanor amid questions about the problem it targets. Rep. Bill Hixon, R-North Augusta, the bill’s sponsor, said he was told by a colleague about a Myrtle Beach man who prides himself on removing hunting dogs’ electronic collars, placing the devices in plastic bags and floating them down a river. The dog owners chase the signal, thinking they are drawing closer to their missing dogs.

Hixon also pointed to an open case in the Upstate, in which a man killed another man’s dog, chopped up its electronic collar and buried the pieces in a tree stump. Authorities charged the man with killing the dog but had no recourse against his destruction of the animal’s collar. Under Hixon’s bill, the penalty for a first-time offender would be a $500 fine or up to 10 days in jail. On Wednesday, the Senate subcommittee sent the bill – and an amendment that would require hunters to put contact information on their dogs’ collars – to the full committee to vote on each piece.

Thoughts? At some $200 a pop for a replacement collar, I would think that intentionally removing a dog’s GPS collar is a pretty clear-cut case of theft/vandalism, and would be illegal, anyway. And if said action ultimately led to the death of a dog there might well be other charges, too. What do you think? Good idea? Bad? What about from the landowner’s perspective? If you find a dog running on your property what legal rights do you think you should have?

So maybe the woolly mammoth turned out to be a hoax, but here’s a cool story about another allegedly non-existent creature, a seabird no one knew existed until a specimen was discovered in a drawer at the Smithsonian.

A bird specimen that sat in a drawer at the Smithsonian for nearly 50 years has been revealed to be a totally new species to science, the first in the United States for 37 years. The discovery of the true identity of the bird was thanks to a sharp-eyed scientist at the Institute for Bird Populations (IBP), who realized that the specimen had been misidentified after it was collected on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in 1963. Differences in measurements and physical appearance compared to other similar species were confirmed by DNA analysis, and the bird was given the name Bryan’s Shearwater, Puffinus bryani. “…The Bryan’s Shearwater is the first new species to be described from the United States and Hawaiian Islands since the Po’ouli was discovered in the forests of Maui in 1974. The Bryan’s Shearwater is the smallest shearwater known to exist. It is black and white with a black or blue-gray bill and blue legs. Biologists found the species in a burrow among a colony of petrels during the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program in 1963.

But here’s the sadly ironic catch: the newly-discovered, newly christened Bryan’s Shearwater may actually be extinct.

“We don’t believe that Bryan’s Shearwaters breed regularly on Midway or other Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, based on the extensive seabird work in these islands by biologists with the Pacific Seabird Project,” Pyle said. The specimen was the only observation during this extensive project, which occurred on islands and atolls throughout the North Pacific from 1963 until 1968. “They would almost certainly have encountered more Bryan’s shearwaters then and since if they bred regularly in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.” Given that Bryan’s shearwaters have remained undiscovered until now, they could be very rare. It is sadly even possible that they went extinct before ever being recognized, although there is at least one more record of a bird in a burrow on Midway from 1990, and observations at sea of what could be Bryan’s Shearwaters as recently as 2005.

Interesting stuff. Here’s to hoping there are some more Bryan’s Shearwaters out there. It’s nice to know that even today, there’s still a little natural mystery in this world. We could use some more of this.

Siberia is a big, wild and isolated piece of real estate. There’s a good reason the Soviet Union stuck its gulags there. It’s a huge chunk of the earth’s surface and it’s a land of mystery, too. The Tunguska explosion, the fabled and rare Siberian tigers, and the persistent rumors of small, isolated populations of woolly mammoths. Wait. Woolly mammoths?

According to this amazing video, what you’re watching is a woolly mammoth crossing a river deep in the heart of Siberia. The video has become an Internet sensation. Some say it’s a real live woolly mammoth, others say its a blurry image of a bear carrying a large fish it its mouth. Do you think it’s genuine? Keep reading to find out…

So what did you say? Fake or real? Well, score one for the skeptics. Here’s the rest of the story…

Last week, a new video surfaced claiming to show a live woolly mammoth ˜ an animal scientists think has been extinct for at least four millennia ˜ crossing a river in Russia . The suspiciously blurry footage was allegedly “caught by a government-employed engineer last summer in the Chukotka Autonomous Okrug region of Siberia ,” according to a story in The Sun newspaper.

“…Some suspected the video is an outright hoax ˜ a computer-generated mammoth digitally inserted into a real river scene. Many others, however, were convinced that the animal was real: not a mammoth, but instead a bear with a large fish hanging from its mouth. That would explain its relatively small size, the shape of the “trunk” on its head, and the color. Experts cast doubts on the video’s authenticity; Derek Serra, a Hollywood video effects artist, concluded that it “appears to have been intentionally blurred.”

Serra isn’t the only expert who can shed some light on this mystery: another person is Ludovic Petho. His name may not be familiar to most people, but his work has been seen by millions; he filmed themammoth footage at the Kitoy River in Siberia’s Sayan Mountains in the summer of 2011. He’s not an anonymous government engineer, but instead a writer and videographer. Petho filmed the river scene during a 10-day solo hike in the mountains as part of a video project he’s working on about his grandfather’s escape from a Siberian POW camp in 1915 and his walk across Siberia to Budapest, Hungary. The footage may end up being used in a documentary film ˜ but there’s one big difference between the video he shot and the woolly mammoth video.

“I don’t recall seeing a mammoth; there were bears, deer, and sable,” he said in an interview with Life’s Little Mysteries. “But no woolly mammoths. I had no idea my footage was used to make this fake sighting.”

So there you go. Looks like we can all put away our mammoth guns. Probably a good thing. Who needs another contentious “what’s the best mammoth caliber” debate, right?